EU offers €400 000 in prizes to the best smarter cities and smarter businesses apps in Europe’s biggest ever app challenge

Brussels, Belgium, 29-11-2013 — /EuropaWire/ — In Europe’s biggest ever app challenge the EU is offering €400 000 in prizes to best new applications that help build smarter cities and smarter businesses. Campus Party, the world’s largest geek forum, will manage the contest, judged by specialized engineers from the EU-funded FI-WARE Consortium.

The only condition of the competition is that app entries should build on the building blocks deployed in the EU’s project to build the core platform of tomorrow’s internet.

50 of these existing building blocks already exist – and are freely available through the FI-WARE Open Innovation Lab for developers to experiment with. They provide generic functions that can be used by a wide range of different applications from all kinds of sectors, like cloud hosting, big data analysis, identity management or the Internet of Things. This app challenge seeks to enable services based on those building blocks.

How can I enter?

It’s easy: enter the FI-WARE contests here. Entries close on 20 December 2013.

Anyone can enter. Individuals, small businesses and web entrepreneurs are especially encouraged to enter. You can enter with an idea only, but entrants are encouraged to illustrate their idea with a draft prototype.

Competition categories

Competition prizes

Competition entrants will compete for a total of €400 000 in prize money, divided between the two categories – Smart Cities apps and Smart Business apps. In the first round, there will be up to 20 prizes of€2 800 each, and the opportunity to attend Campus Party 2014 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to in turn compete for:

• First Prize: €75 000
• Second Prize: €40 000
• Third Prize: €20 000
• Special Mention for Young Developer: €5 000
• Special Mention for Most Innovative App: €5 000

Background

The European App Economy is already composed of 529 000 jobs, and supports a total of 794 000 jobs. This generates €10 billion in revenues annually, and makes up 22% of the global app economy. Other future services like cloud computing could contribute 250 billion euros to EU GDP in 2020.

A jury composed of specialised engineers from the FI-WARE Consortium will evaluate all the ideas submitted to the competition. Judges are not allowed to enter the competition.

An earlier contest took place in 2013, with the winners announced at Campus Party London in September 2013. In that contest applications were built on FI-LAB, demonstrating the technologies available to developers to experiment with for free.

Useful links

Video about FI-WARE

About Campus Party

Hashtags: #fiware, #CampusParty2014, #CampusParty, Twitter account: @FIware

Neelie Kroes